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RE: Showing and hiding data

for

From: julian.rickards@ndm.gov.on.ca
Date: Jul 23, 2003 1:28PM

Rachel:

You seem to be contradicting yourself. You say that your Intranet does not
need to adhere to Section 508 yet you are concerned with assistive
technologies and their interaction with JS. Given that the JS you plan to
use is not simply decorative, such as image rollovers, but more
sophisticated and critical to the operation of your page, it is my opinion
that you may have to make a decision as to whether you wish to support
Section 508 or leave it alone altogether.

Although the page refresh may work (technically), I don't think it is a very
user friendly method - it is my limited understanding that JAWS users are
informed of a new page in front of them (the result of a refresh) which for
the purposes of just updating a particular field, may be annoying. My
personal opinion is to try to avoid critical JS if you are concerned about
accessibility and use server-side coding instead.

It might have been possible to use browser sniffing to determine the browser
being used and offer a different format of the forms based on that
information. Another possible method might be to make use of the <noscript>
tag to provide non-JavaScript alternate format for the form but
unfortunately, since JAWS runs on top of IE, JS browser sniffing would show
IE, not JAWS which means that JAWS may not be detectable. Furthermore, it is
not possible to disable JS from IE which means that from the perspective of
the JS, JS is always enabled and the browser is always IE. However, you may
wish to add a link such as "Accessible format of this form" and hope that
JAWS users will follow that link instead of continuing with the JS form. The
link would offer a non-JS version of the form - if necessary, divided into
multiple forms to accomodate the various options that the JS would have
offered.

My 2 cents.

Jules


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